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bostonnew
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Or will we always find them with our telescopes well before they hit us?
Could something wipe us out tomorrow?
Could something wipe us out tomorrow?
Nope. They all come from the same direction.Long period comets can come from any direction...
We can get caught by surprise by an asteroid, but it's unlikely that one big enough to wipe us out will surprise us. Most of those have already been found, I believe.
I agree w/ you, but "unlikely" is not impossible, and part of the problem is that IF a big one pops up on everybody's radar screens tomorrow, and it is very big and it is going to hit us in, say, a year, do you think we could DO anything about it? Given a few years and an Apollo-project size commitment, we might be able to, but I wouldn't want to have to count on it.
Any idea what it would take to deflect or destroy an object of sufficient size to threaten Earth?
Massive object a year from colliding with earth?? The prognosis is unfavorable. 10 years, maybe. 1 year, very bad.
I think that's part of the problem. We DON'T know.
I HAVE read studies that show that just detonating a nuclear bomb on it isn't likely to do the trick if it's really big.
I DOES seem that if we could put some kind of propulsive system on it LONG before it was due to hit us that we could drive it off course enought to miss
Unless the explosion dispersed the mass of the asteroid to the extent that a significant amount of it missed the Earth altogether.Many asteroids are nothing more than rubble piles, as evidenced by their low density. Attempting to deflect them with a nuclear explosion would likely do no more than fragment them so that the Earth was subject to multiple large impacts rather than one very large impact.